Roman Polanski’s Fearless Vampire Killers questions articles of faith. Its mixture of hilarity and terror, given elegant form on this occasion, has perhaps obstructed the view of many as to how serious a film it is. Even some who profess liking the film deny it a second thought, as if anything so entertaining must be brain-dead. But Polanski’s impish spirit allows him to do authentic work that is also very funny, as in the case of The Fat and the Lean (1961), a slapstick short about one man’s exploitation of another—a political parable. For the record, I understand that the version of The Fearless Vampire Killers that was originally released in the States, in 1967, had the blood sucked out of it.
Fortunately, the version we now get to see probably conveys something of Polanski’s intent, although a half-hour of his cut remains bitten off. (Polanski has repudiated the film’s abbreviated incarnations.) It is a stinging assault on orthodoxy, on traditional ideas and conventional modes of thinking.
Imagine a film of Dracula whose principal target is Professor van Helsing and you will have some idea how radical a film Polanski has wrought. Viewers of the film err in thinking that Polanski’s appearance in a lead role, as one of the vampire killers (and what a lovely performance it is!), assures us that the vampire killers are the heroes, the “good guys.” (Polanski didn’t cast himself as a “good guy” in Chinatown, 1974, either.) Nor do the bumbling procedures of the vampire-hunting pair, Professor Ambronsius (Jack MacGowran, wonderful) and his young assistant, Alfred, testify to the two’s being on the right side of things; consider the bumbling pack of thieves in Mario Monicelli’s I Soliti ignoti (The Usual Unidentified Thieves; The Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958).
Roman Polanski was born in Paris in 1933. When he was three years old, his Jewish parents relocated with their son to Kraków in their native Poland. During the war Polanski’s parents were deported to Auschwitz, where his mother died. His father had arranged for a family to take care of the boy, but Roman nevertheless passed from hand to hand, often surviving amidst rubble in the streets, successfully eluding German capture. The astonishing particularity of certain scenes from his later The Pianist (2002) derive from the filmmaker’s recollected observations from this period of his young life. One of the dozen most brilliant novels of the twentieth century, friend Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird (1965) offers a trenchant, highly symbolical account of such a boy on the run throughout the Polish countryside. The boy’s bizarre experiences amongst primitive Catholic peasant families drew upon Kosinski’s own life and imagination, of course, but we now know that Polanski’s example inspired much of the book. Polanski reunited with his father after the war, while the boy in The Painted Bird, returning home, was a changed soul, restless, unsettled. Wearing a cape, he roamed streets throughout the night, committing mischief and mayhem. He had become a vampire—an interiorization of the superstitiousness to which he had been exposed amongst rural peasants during the war.
Although Jewish lore contains a wealth of vampire legends, the bloodsucking beasts principally belong to Christian myth and principally refer to Jewish people. This libel has persisted for centuries, in the Middle Ages accounting for a voluminous number of Jewish persecutions and executions owing to the fiction that Jews kill Christian children, including Christian infants, to use their fresh blood in the preparation of Passover matzoth. Ignorance, cruelty and insanity die hard. Writing in a March 10, 2002, column in Al-Riyadh, a government-approved daily Saudi newspaper, Dr. Umayma Ahmad Al-Jalahma of King Faisal University wrote that Jews currently use the blood of teenagers in pastries baked for Purim, ironically, a holiday commemorating Jewish success in foiling an attempt in biblical times to massacre them. Al-Jalahma wrote: “the victim must be a mature adolescent who is, of course, a non-Jew—that is, a Christian or a Muslim. His blood is taken and dried into granules. The [rabbi] blends these granules into the pastry dough . . . Let us now examine how the victims’ blood is spilled. For this, a needle-studded barrel is used; this is a kind of barrel, about the size of the human body, with extremely sharp needles set in it on all sides. [These needles] pierce the victim’s body, from the moment he is placed in the barrel. . . . the victim’s blood drips from him very slowly. Thus, the victim suffers dreadful torment—torment that affords the Jewish vampires great delight as they carefully monitor every detail of the blood-shedding with pleasure and love . . . the [rabbi] makes his coreligionists completely happy on their holiday when he serves them the pastries in which human blood is mixed” (English translation: Middle East Media Research Institute).
Jewish vampires. For centuries, caricature drawings and cartoons have dehumanized Jews by portraying them as a wide variety of nonhumans, including vampire bats.
All this is by way of providing some context for the most celebrated joke in Polanski’s film. A vampire, the former innkeeper, approaches a maiden, one of his daughters, in order to bite her neck as she lies fetchingly in bed. Seeing him, she brandishes a crucifix—what she has been taught (by her Catholic mother) good Christian girls do in order to ward off intruding vampires. The vampire looks at her and shakes its head, declaring aloud, “Oy, have you got the wrong vampire!” The crucifix hasn’t the capacity to work on a Jewish vampire.
The idea behind this hilarious moment is gripping. A father’s obsessive concern with a daughter’s purity masks his own projective incestuous desire. One may disagree, and still the idea shakes one up.
This particular vampire—there are lots of vampires in this movie; they constitute a whole race—is the only one that is Jewish. However, just this one accomplishes three things—two overtly; one as a collateral boon. It underscores the outcast status of vampires. This, in turn, implies that vampires, symbolically, are the victims of society’s tendency to dehumanize those whom society sees as being somehow different, hence, suspicious, hence, dangerous. Scratch the image, even with humor, and you expose the anti-Semitic reality underneath. Thirdly, why would a vampire shield its eyes and withdraw from a crucifix? The soulless vampire, the theory goes, yet retains some sort of Christian impulse—let’s say an electric impulse—from its former living existence. Thus the vampire is shamed by its current separation from everything holy. Do Jews have anything to feel ashamed of where Jesus, their most rambuctious rabbi, is concerned? In certain Christian eyes, two things: (1) Jews had a hand in the killing of Jesus; (2) they missed their Messiah and now are waiting for Godot. With a simple, hilariously funny joke, Polanski deftly refutes all basis for Jewish shame over anything having to do with Jesus Christ. We may say, then, a Jewish impulse survived in this Roman Catholic convert, who has lived to see his Church reverse itself on the subject of Jewish complicity in the death of The Christ.
Polanski has not made a Mel Brooks film here—a grab at any laugh the film can get. Brooks’s vastly inferior Young Frankenstein (1974), for instance, is a patchwork of broad sketches and one-liners. Jokes resonate in Polanski’s film, acquire depth, because they contribute to the development of an overarching theme. Turning us and our expectations upside down (and driving some viewers batty in the process), Polanski’s dark comedy is about something: the persecution and execution of vampires by vampire killers. In this film, vampires are just out for a little blood to keep themselves going, and these two gnats, the professor and his assistant, keep bugging them relentlessly, remorselessly, pig-headedly. When we normally think of vampires, we think “the undead.” With a flip of conventionality, Polanski allows us to think the thing through from the other side of life; the whole existence of vampires shows their dedication to staying in play. They are aiming for whatever life is open to them, and they’re making every effort to hold onto it. Underneath the comedy is, metaphorically, testimony to a people’s survival instinct arrayed against historic persecutions, pogroms and the Holocaust. This is what gives Polanski’s film, for all its comical generosity (some would say, excess) its staying power.
There can be no question that Professor Ambronsius is the real villain of the piece. The film opens with a closeup of the moon—symbolic of illusion and delusions—from which, in an amazing trick shot, the camera withdraws all the way down to a snowy road on Earth, on which our pair of vampire killers is in an open carriage in Transylvania in the 1800s. While Alfred is fighting off dogs with his stiff but unproductive umbrella (Freudian symbols aren’t hard to come by in this film), the cold has ossified the professor into something like a coma. Our initial image of him, then, is as an icy mummy—an undercutting of any potential heroic stature. Moreover, voiceover commentary, while calling him “brilliant,” notes with Melvillian cunning that this brilliance of his has gone unrecognized and thus he has dedicated himself to hunting down vampires (his betters?) throughout Europe, the implication being that the professor’s current labors are the product of his frustrated and disappointing existence. He and Alfred stop by a bustling inn, where Ambronsius is heated back into some semblance of humanity. It is night. Eventually they will proceed to a local vampire’s luxuriant castle—in Alfred’s case, to rescue Sarah, the innkeeper’s daughter with whom he is charmingly smitten, whom Count von Krolock wishes to add to his harem. (Beauteous, ill-fated Sharon Tate plays Sarah, and plays her pretty darn well.)
Throughout the film, the professor chides and chastises Alfred, whose spirited romantic heart endears him to us. Besides, the professor isn’t fair; when he and Alfred are investigating weird happenings at the inn and he falls down, he shshes Alfred! If only the boy could break loose of Ambronsius’s paternalistic grip! (Alfred addresses Ambronsius as “master”; once again Polanski is playing “the lean”—and his performance is irresistible.) In this film, the domination associated with villainous vampires in other films has been transferred to Professor Ambronsius vis-à-vis his innocent, pliable, aching-to-please assistant. Polanski keeps turning things upside-down or inside-out.
Visually, the film delights. There is a gorgeous scene in which Alfred, for the delight of Sarah who is looking through a window up above, builds a snowman outside. Our introduction to Krolock is equally breathtaking. Sarah is in the inn’s wooden tub, bathing. The door in the roof opens, ushering in a flurry of snow. The count does his business and escapes through the rooftop hatch with his bride. Sarah’s father, Shagal, leaps up to retrieve his daughter, but to no use; we see his legs dangling. Ambronsius pulls him down; now with a newly initiated vampire on his hands, he fails to persuade Shagal’s widow to drive a wooden stake through her husband’s heart to save his soul.
But it is the ball at Count von Krolock’s castle that is the film’s great set-piece. (Before this, Alfred is eye-candy and a hot prospect to the resident gay vampire!)
Why does Polanski bring such physical beauty to The Fearless Vampire Killers—and in color? Why, when the pair steal into the vampire’s castle, is the tracking camera permitted to take our breath away? (The eerie choral music by Krzysztof Komeda also adds to the film’s haunting beauty.) Again, this reverses our conventional expectations. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr had been visually entrancing (in black and white—or, rather, grays and white), but that was 35 years earlier, and (circa 1967) then-recent and -current Hammer productions had helped make tawdry color and sloppy camera use identifiable features of popular vampire and other horror films.
It is during the ball that our pair engineers Sarah’s escape. Following this is a final scene that some viewers have condemned as a sick joke. I see it as bringing the film to thematic completion. Here is what we are shown. Free, in an open carriage, Alfred has his Sarah by his side, and Professor Ambronsius is in the driver’s seat. Everything appears settled and happy. Suddenly Sarah seems cold to Alfred. Her eyes are glazed; she opens her mouth, revealing fangs. She bites the boy as Ambronsius proceeds, oblivious to what has occurred behind him. Voiceover narration: “That night, fleeing from Transylvania, Professor Ambronsius never guessed the very evil he wished to destroy, thanks to him, would be spread across the world.” This is the ultimate certification of the fool’s non-heroic status; he has bungled his mission (yet again) and will prove the cause of far-reaching “pestilence”: on one level, the life-force of human sexuality; on another, Jewish survival despite an ongoing plethora of counterveiling efforts.
Accompany Polanski through the looking-glass (where vampires cast no reflection), and this cryptic, deliciously comical film opens up, revealing a host of pointy surprises.
The story and script are by Gérard Brach and Polanski. The fangs in the film are credited to Dr. Ludwig Von Krankheit; but that may be an added joke.
